JERUSALEM (AP) — Palestinian Oscar-winning director Basel Adra said that Israeli soldiers conducted a raid at his West Bank home on Saturday, searching for him and going through his wife’s phone.
The Israel Defense Forces said the raid occurred after two Israelis were injured by stone-throwing in the area.
Israeli settlers attacked his village, injuring two of his brothers and one cousin, Adra told The Associated Press. He accompanied them to the hospital. While there, he said that he heard from family in the village that nine Israeli soldiers had stormed his home.
The soldiers asked his wife, Suha, for his whereabouts and went through her phone, he said, while his 9-month-old daughter was home. They also briefly detained one of his uncles, he said.
As of Saturday night, Adra said he had no way of returning home to check on his family, because soldiers were blocking the entrance to the village and he was scared of being detained.
The military said in response to an inquiry that it had received reports that “a number of terrorists hurled stones at Israeli civilians near at-Tuwani.” As a result of the stone throwing, two Israelis were injured, it said.
Following the reports, the IDF said it dispatched troops to the scene, “and they are currently scanning the area and questioning suspects.”
Among those questioned was Adra, a military source confirmed to The Times of Israel.
Adra has spent his career as a journalist and filmmaker chronicling settler violence in Masafer Yatta, the southern reaches of the West Bank where he was born. After settlers attacked his co-director, Hamdan Ballal, in March, he told the AP that he felt they were being targeted more intensely since winning the Oscar.
He described Saturday’s events as “horrific.”
“Even if you are just filming the settlers, the army comes and chases you, searches your house,” he said. “The whole system is built to attack us, to terrify us, to make us very scared.”
Another co-director, Yuval Abraham, said he was “terrified for Basel.”
“What happened today in his village, we’ve seen this dynamic again and again, where the Israeli settlers brutally attack a Palestinian village and later on the army comes, and attacks the Palestinians.”
“No Other Land,” which won an Oscar this year for best documentary, depicts the struggle by residents of the Masafer Yatta area to stop the Israeli military from demolishing their villages, located in a designated IDF live-fire training zone.
Ballal and Adra made the joint Palestinian-Israeli production with Israeli directors Abraham and Rachel Szor.
The film has won a string of international awards, starting at the Berlin International Film Festival in 2024. It has also drawn ire in Israel and abroad, as when Miami Beach proposed ending the lease of a movie theater that screened the documentary.
The Israeli military designated Masafer Yatta in the southern West Bank as a live-fire training zone in the 1980s and ordered residents, mostly Arab Bedouin, to be expelled. Around 1,000 residents have largely remained in place, but soldiers regularly move in to demolish homes, tents, water tanks and olive orchards — and Palestinians fear outright expulsion could come at any time.